Michigan

Our local elected officials were debating a new tax to help offset a big public pension shortfall... If people dueled in 2019 like Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton did in 1804, a couple of township trustees might have been drawing pistols at dawn.

When we moved to Michigan from Florida in 2014, we braced ourselves for a dramatic change in weather (hello, snow!) and our state tax bill (good-bye, income-tax-free Florida!). We also learned from a newly-retired Michigander that when the time comes, we’d have to pay the state’s 4.25 percent income tax on pension income.

It is time for TaxVox’ s annual Lump of Coal awards for the worst tax ideas (or most depressing tax stories) of 2015. As always, choosing the Top 10 was not easy, but here they are: 10. The Michigan House . Lawmakers tried to pay for new transportation projects by eliminating the state’s earned

The Senate’s six-year highway bill inches forward, after dropping a Social Security provision. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won 14 Democrats’ votes for the bill after he agreed to drop a $2.3 billion offset. The money would have come from barring people with felony warrants from getting Social

The House has a short-term patch for the Highway Trust Fund… Late Monday night, the House Ways & Means Committee released a plan to cover the Highway Trust Fund with $8.1 billion through mid-December 2015. The patch would use revenue collected by tightening IRS compliance rules. The House could

In about six weeks, federal money to keep the Highway Trust Fund going will once again dry up and Congress will begin its predictable scramble to keep cash flowing to roads, bridges, and transit projects. The reason for the gridlock: Neither Congress nor President Obama is willing to back a gas tax

A short road too often traveled. Federal highway funding is due to expire in about two weeks, and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx says a temporary extension—the 33rd in six years—would “prolong a dangerous status quo of funding infrastructure at a level that has left our transportation system

Everything is bigger in Texas, except tax relief for its low-income residents. Tax cuts are a sure bet in the Lone Star state this year, but it’s hard to provide tax relief to everybody without a state income tax. TPC’s Richard Auxier explains that Texas’ reliance on sales and property taxes makes